Blow: Poems

Blow is a collection of poems that meditates on desire, depression, mortality, and our relation to the animal world. These pieces are primarily written from the first-person perspective of the speaker, and their settings range from camp grounds, to dance halls, to Times Square, to the zoo. While most of the poems are initially grounded in time and space, they are also very interior; they move lyrically and evade narrative focus. Broadly speaking, Blow seeks to explore the iterations of a moment of impact, iterations that are both physical and emotional. The speaker in this collection is often blindsided, awestruck, crushed, and blown away.

Formally, many of these pieces are free-verse poems; however, the manuscript also includes several sonnets, haiku, nonce forms, and a villanelle. Thematically, the collection’s tone of struck-ness often manifests as an intersection between dreaming and hallucinating—it is “hallucinatory”—and readers must therefore question the reliability of the speaker’s perceptions. The poems in Blow are, in a way, about seeing stars—or at least perceiving them.

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